Although the official notice went out in November, we thought this further integration with Ex Libris Primo was worthy of its own blog post. Scopus and Ex Libris®Group, a leader in the provision of library technology solutions, announced on November 18 a collaborative initiative to use the source-normalized impact per paper (SNIP) and SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) metrics included in Scopus. Primo plans to use these article/journal metrics to calculate the relevance ranking for the Primo discovery service search results.

So what’s so great about SNIP and SJR? For SNIP, an important distinction is that it takes into account the fact that the frequency of citations varies from one field to another thus normalizing for field so that comparisons can be made. The SJR indicator combines several factors to produce a measure of the prestige of the citing source (some like to compare this to the way Google ranks pages).

With this new initiative, the SNIP and SJR metrics will be included in the Primo algorithm for calculating the relevance of search results. Also, the display of results will show these metrics to help users assess the scholarly significance of items appearing in their search results.